Federal court dockets contain some of the most valuable public records available: filings, motions, orders, and judgments across thousands of cases in district and appellate courts. PACER is the official access system but it charges per page and the search interface is limited. RECAP is a free archive that mirrors PACER documents contributed by users. Accessing this data programmatically is the fastest way to do legal research at scale.
Why automate this?
Litigation research teams track active cases involving specific companies, individuals, or legal issues. Due diligence analysts search for litigation history before acquisitions or investments. Journalists investigating legal matters pull dockets and filings for specific parties. Academic researchers studying litigation patterns need bulk access to case metadata. Compliance teams monitor regulatory enforcement actions filed in federal court. Manual PACER searches are slow, expensive, and not built for batch queries or recurring monitoring.
What data you get
The RECAP Federal Court Dockets scraper returns structured records including:
- Case name, number, and court
- Date filed and date terminated
- Nature of suit and cause of action
- Party names (plaintiffs, defendants, and counsel)
- Docket entries with dates and descriptions
- Document links where available through RECAP archive
- Judge assignment
- Jurisdiction and case type
You can search by party name, attorney, case number, court, or keyword. Results are returned as JSON.
How it works
The scraper queries the CourtListener/RECAP search API, which indexes millions of federal court documents. It handles pagination, extracts docket metadata and entry summaries, and returns normalized records. Document retrieval is limited to what is in the RECAP archive (contributed by other users).
Common use cases
Due diligence analysts search for all federal litigation involving a target company before an acquisition. Legal research teams pull all cases with a specific nature of suit code in a particular district. Journalists covering enforcement track DOJ and SEC civil actions by party name. Academic researchers studying patent litigation or class actions pull case metadata across multiple years and courts.
Getting started
The actor runs on Apify. Provide a party name, case number, or keyword, select courts if needed, and run. No PACER account required. Output is structured JSON from the free RECAP archive.
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